1. Field of the Invention
This invention is generally related to digital imaging, and, more specifically, to techniques of packaging digital images that may be in different native formats and translating them into a common format.
2. Related Art
The increasing availability of digital imaging devices such as the digital camera has created an unprecedented opportunity for the convergence of the personal computer (PC) industry and the photographic industry. The pictures produced by digital cameras are ideally suited for use with a PC, making the marriage of digital cameras and personal computers seem perfect. There is, however, a significant obstacle to this union.
The current practice in the digital photography business is for manufacturers to develop digital cameras independently of one another. This is not likely to change. Each such new camera is typically bundled with a vertically integrated software package that allows images to be viewed on a host processing system. The software is designed specifically to work with that camera and does not support compatibility with different types of digital cameras or cameras from different manufacturers. There is little or no agreement between manufacturers on how the digital images should be stored aboard the camera, how they should be processed before they are stored, or how the host system (e.g., PC) should handle them.
The closest conventional attempt at a standard for the transfer of images between the device and host is the Twain driver. The Twain driver is a software module that provides a standard interface to application programs for retrieving digital images from an imaging device. The module translates images from the imaging deviceìs native format into some common format used by the application. Examples of such common formats include the red, green, and blue (RGB) bitmap and the device independent bitmap (DIB) as defined by Microsoft Corp.
Different types of digital cameras often use different native formats for storing digital images. A Twain module specific to a given combination of device, native format, and host operating system (OS) could be stored aboard the digital camera. The Twain module could then be transferred to each new host along with the image data. However, it may not be practical to store such a module aboard a digital camera because of limited memory resources in digital cameras. Also, such modules interact directly with the host operating system, thus creating a security risk as viruses in the camera may be propagated into the host system. Finally, the Twain module is typically written in code that is specific to a particular host processor, making the Twain solution not truly portable.
It would therefore be desirable to have a technique that allows different types of imaging devices that store digital images in different native formats to communicate with a host system to allow the viewing or processing of such images in a common format aboard the host, without having to also load a bulky device-specific Twain driver into the host system.